212 Black Elk
tagonist struggles in vain to evade his own death, the
ultimately isolating event in the human life cycle.
The plot shows circumstances evolving quickly to
wall the main character off from his family, home,
and peers. Alone in that condition, with only his
inner resources at hand to draw on, he shows himself
victimized even in the final seconds of his life by
the false hope of escape. Only the reader keeps him
company on his last, hallucinatory journey.
Peyton Farquhar, Bierce’s protagonist and center
of consciousness, and the only rounded character in
the story, is a handsome young Alabama planter, a
civilian gentleman whom Union forces single out,
set up, capture, isolate, and hang as part of their
attempt to subdue his homeland, the South, during
the American Civil War. In a mental effort toward
self-preservation, Farquhar envisions himself as the
hero of his own narrative, escaping death by falling
into the stream, scrambling out amid a spray of bul-
lets, and making his way before nightfall back to the
security of his home.
Bierce’s last sentence depicts Farquhar in his
real, and ultimate, isolation: “... dead; his body, with
a broken neck, [swinging] gently from side to side
beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.” Far-
quhar’s wife, his sole ally, is 30 miles away at home
and unaware of her husband’s fate. (The story men-
tions their children but does not depict them.) The
others who are present, enemy soldiers carrying out
his execution with cold military precision, offer no
human company during his last ordeal; in the course
of his imagined escape, they spray him with bullets.
Multiple factors contribute to Farquhar’s isola-
tion. The story is vague about why this 35-year-old
could not enlist to fight for the Confederacy, but
we know he is “at heart a soldier” who has had to
stay at home, while others of his age and class have
gone off to war. He wants to help out and envisions
himself heroic. His only peer or social connection
is his wife, a flat character—passive, powerless, and
absent when he dies. His homeland is occupied by
the enemy, the Union Army, and the story insinuates
that they have intentionally set him up as a kind of
scapegoat just so they can have a military rationale
for putting him to death. As a planter, he symbolizes
to them the Southern social and economic system
they are fighting to overthrow. Farquhar is a man
without allies who must act alone—and die alone.
In demeanor, the enemy soldiers who preside
over Farquhar’s execution are detached from and
impassive toward their victim. As Bierce shows Far-
quhar’s consciousness during his last ordeal, dealing
with the painful suffocation of the noose but even
at that moment conjuring up an alternate reality to
reunite himself with his dear wife, Farquhar’s only
real companions in the world are the story’s readers,
each a separate and helpless witness to the futile
efforts of a dying man as he tries to make one last
human contact by returning home.
Bierce’s closing sentence shows Farquhar in
absolute isolation, left without spouse or children,
home, fellow soldiers, countrymen, or even the
contact of the beloved land itself as he dangles in
thin air above the creek. Farquhar’s lonely terminal
struggle lets readers imagine the isolation of a cruel
death. His alienated situation offers no hope for any
kind of mitigating reunion in eternity. In Bierce’s
bleak microcosm, each lonely human struggles, out-
numbered, against an array of alien forces.
Roy Neil GravesBLACK ELK Black Elk Speaks (1932)
A seminal work that merges history, politics, and
spirituality, Black Elk Speaks serves as a testimony
to the collective experience of Native American
nations across the continent who were the victims
of genocide and disenfranchisement during the
19th century. The narrative, originally transcribed
and published in 1932 by the poet and philosopher
John G. Neihardt (1881–1973), records the life and
visions of Black Elk (1863–1950), a holy man from
the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) nation, a traveler in Wild
Bill’s Wild West Show, and a relative of the famous
Chief Crazy Horse.
Historically, the book conveys the early encoun-
ters between the U.S. Army and the Lakota people
as experienced through the eyes of young Black Elk
(Hehaka Sapa). The transformation of ancestral
lands into Americanized settlements serves as a
backdrop for the decimation of the sacred bison,
General Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn in
1876, and the butchering of Black Elk’s people at